Max Planck Institute

The Max Planck Society (MPG) is Germany's most successful research organization established in 1948. Max Planck Institutes focus on research fields that are particularly innovative, or that are especially demanding in terms of funding or time requirements. The MPG contributes to the project with two of its institutes:

Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) is dedicated to fundamental climate research. The overall mission of MPI-M is to understand how chemical, physical, and biological processes, as well as human behavior contribute to the dynamics of the Earth system, and specifically how they relate to global climate changes. MPI-M develops a state-of-the-art MPI Earth System Model (MPI-ESM), which includes components dealing with the atmosphere (ECHAM), ocean and sea ice (MPIOM), land surface & biosphere (JSBACH), and oceanic biogeochemistry processes (HAMOCC). MPI-M acts as the focal point of climate research in Germany since 30 years, also contributing to integrated assessment studies and socio-economic/climate interactions. MPI-M is committed to make MPI- ESM available to the scientific community in Europe and elsewhere and to inform decision-makers and the public on questions related to Climate Change and Global Change. MPI-M manages an International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) for Earth System Modeling, which hosts approximately 50 PhD students.

MPI-M develops MPI-ESM and uses it to understand and project climate and carbon cycle dynamics, in particular under anthropogenic forcings. The MPI-ESM will be used in the sixth phase of the coupled model intercomparison project (CMIP6) in concerted action with many other world leading climate centres, including groups developing six other European ESMs (e.g., EC-Earth, IPSL-CM, UKESM) involved into the H2020 CRESCENDO project. A strength of the MPI-M team is in joint efforts of land, ocean, and atmospheric departments on linking processes and feedbacks in the Earth System, which are especially relevant for the Arctic focus of the Nunataryuk project. We will utilize in-house expertise on the sea-ice modelling and observations (a group led by D. Notz), cloud feedback and climate sensitivity (T. Mauritsen’s group), terrestrial permafrost physics and land surface hydrology (S. Hagemann’s group) which will be available in addition to the core groups modelling processes in JSBACH (led by V. Brovkin) and HAMOCC (led by T. Ilyina).

The research mission of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (MPI-BGC) is the investigation of the global biogeochemical cycles and their interaction with the climate system. The institute combines strong observational and process-based studies (soil carbon, plant community and growth, vegetation-atmosphere fluxes) with global scale modeling (e.g. vegetation dynamics, global carbon cycle, aerosol). MPI-BGC is one of the pivotal European research institutions in its field, and as such was coordinating the CARBOEUROPE-IP project (FP6) and the FP7 projects CarboSchools, CARBO-Extreme and IGAS, and is currently leading the project BACI as well as the ERC grants QUINCY and 14Constraint (Horizon 2020). Moreover, the institute is strongly involved in more than ten collaborative EU projects, around 30 projects from other international (e.g. ESA) and national sources. MPI-BGC also co-leads international collaborative efforts such as FLUXNET and the global TRY database on plant traits. Not only does the institute have an outstanding international reputation for its research success but it has a strong commitment to higher education and scientific training, housing around 60 Ph.D. students from more than 25 countries and operating the International Max Planck Research School for global Biogeochemical Cycles in cooperation with the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. The institute successfully maintains numerous scientific collaborations in a wide range of geographical locations and scientific disciplines, including long-term observation sites in the Arctic, and manages two large observational towers in Siberia and the Amazon.

Main tasks in the project

MPI-M will lead WP8 and contribute to various WPs and tasks regarding ESM improvement and evaluation. MPI-BGC is one out of four partner institutions contributing to Nunataryuk work package 2 ‘Coastal permafrost dynamics’. The MPI-BGC research will mostly focus on the characterization and quantification of lateral export processes of carbon within terrestrial watersheds, and the identification of controlling factors that influence the spatio-temporal variability of this signal.